Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains by Jon Krakauer

"...Marc and I had come to Switzerland to climb the Nordwand. Marc, eight years my junior, sports two earrings in his left ear and a purple haircut that would do a punk rocker proud. He is also a red-hot climber. One of the differences between us was that Marc wanted very badly to climb the Eiger, while I wanted very badly only to have climbed the Eiger. Marc, understand, is at that age when the pituitary secretes an overabundance of those hormones that mask the subtler emotions, such as fear. He tends to confuse things like life-or-death climbing with fun. As a friendly gesture, I planned to let Marc lead all the most fun pitches on the Nordwand." (3-4)

"As the day wore on, I could feel my nerves beginning to unravel. At one point, while leading over crusty, crumbly vertical ice on the Ice Hose, I suddenly become overwhelmed by the fact that the only things preventing me from flying off into space were two thin steel picks sunk half an inch into a medium that resembled the inside of my freezer when it needs to be defrosted. I looked down at the ground more than three thousand feet below and felt dizzy, as if I were about to faint. I had to close my eyes and take a dozen deep breathes before I could resume climbing." (11)

(New York: Lyons Press, 1990)

Touching the Void by Joe Simpson

I have never read a more emotional, impossible, unnerving survival story. Downright terrifying, I was quite literally biting my nails through the entire 170 pages. At this point, Joe has survived shattering his knee and breaking his heel, has been painfully lowered 2,000 feet down an exposed mountain face in a snowstorm, fallen 100 feet into a crevasse, climbed back out with one good leg, crawled across a fracture-filled glacier, hopped/crawled for miles through boulder-strewn moraines, all without food or water for days. We are in his head for the entirety:

"The voice kept urging me on, 'Place-lift-brace hop...keep going. Look how far you've gone. Just do it, don't think about it...'

I did as I was told. Stumbling past and sometimes over boulders, falling, crying, swearing in a litany that matched the pattern of my hopping. I forgot why I was doing it; forgot even the idea that I probably wouldn't make it. Running on instincts that I had never suspected were in me, and drifting down the sea of moraines in a blurred delirium of thirst, and pain and hopping, I timed myself religiously. I looked ahead to a landmark and gave myself half an hour to reach it. As I neared the mark, a furious bout of watch-glancing would ensue, until it became part of the pattern...place-lift-brace-hop-time. If I realised I was behind time I tried to rush the last ten minutes of hopping. I fell so much more when I rushed but it had become so damned important to beat the watch. Only once did I fail to beat it, and I sobbed with annoyance. The watch became as crucial as my good leg. I had no sense of time passing, and with each fall I lay in a semi-stupor, accepting the pain and quite unaware of how long I had been there. A look at the watch would galvanise me into action, especially when I saw it had been five minutes and not the thirty seconds it had felt like. " (138-139)

His descriptions of being half in and out of consciousness are immediate and stunning:

"Without checking my watch I had lain in stupefied exhaustion after every fall. Lain there and listened to endless stories running through the pain, watched short dreams of life in the real world, played songs to my heartbeat, licked the mud for water, and wasted countless hours in an empty dream." (141)

(New York: HarperPerennial, 1998)